


Loss of Yesterday

by Jintian



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2000-02-27
Updated: 2000-02-27
Packaged: 2017-10-29 20:23:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/323825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jintian/pseuds/Jintian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Takes place in November 1994 between "Firewalker" and "Irresistible."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Loss of Yesterday

**Author's Note:**

> For the purposes of fiction I'm eliminating the month-long quarantine Mulder mentions at the end of "Firewalker."
> 
> Beta thanks to Blackwood and Cameo.

  
These days she wanted to write something.

Three months gone in the white light of memory. Sometimes at stoplights she would look around and notice a new thing, a building or a sign, and would not remember how it got there. She wanted to write down what things were like before.

Her partner watched her in the mornings with mouth drawn closed, the gloom of the basement paling his skin and her skin. Sometimes they would come up out of the elevator and he would think of bodies rising from underwater, the gentle rot of flesh.

A few times she woke in the middle of the night, shaking herself from dreams of falling. Even when she opened her eyes and realized the firm presence of the mattress, that she had in fact not disappeared through some black rip in the universe, she would jerk herself up and away from the bed. She had to be sure she could still stand on firm ground.

They took a case. Or rather, he took a case, and she insisted she was ready. They arrived in the Cascades together. He went beneath a volcano, and when he came back she was handcuffed to a dead woman.

She had only just awoken out of a coma bed, and he could imagine those pale sheets somewhere, still holding a measure of warmth from her body.

*

There was the morning she arrived late to work. The door opened at a quarter after nine and their eyes met for the briefest second, hers sliding away and to the floor as she approached his desk. She sat in her usual chair across from him and he studied her face, porcelain-like under the basement lights.

"Are you..." he began, but she interrupted him.

"I'm fine, Mulder. Just slept through my alarm."

He had more to say. She had lied to the floor and he wanted to look at her eyes. But when she finally did glance at him he closed his mouth.

She asked, "Is there any paperwork to finish from last week?" Her cheeks were getting hollow, he saw, and her hair was longer. For a moment the light on her skin made it look like bone.

He swallowed and shrugged, shuffling through the files on his desk. "There always is. You want to do an expense report?"

She held out her hand, and he gave her a sheaf of receipts. "Any new cases on the board?"

He thought of the call that morning from the Minneapolis field office, an Agent Bocks handling a serial grave desecrater. Bocks thought it might be in their "line of work." Mulder had his eye on a Vikings-Redskins game more than the investigation of a death fetishist, but there was no need for Scully to know that.

And no need for her to accompany him either. He looked down at his desk, where the 302 lay half-finished, and shrugged again.

Handcuffed to a dead woman.

"Maybe," he said.

She gave him a brief nod and stood, turning to the door. "Well, let me know as soon as you find something."

He couldn't help himself. "Wouldn't you rather take some time for rest?"

Scully paused, looking back at him. "Of course not. I'm fine, Mulder. Don't lighten the caseload on my account."

He realized she wanted him to respond. "I'm not," he told her, pinching his tie between thumb and forefinger. "I just thought..."

She let him flounder under her calm gaze, then finally said, "I'll stop by this afternoon." Her heels clicked away down the hall, leaving him in the dim silence of the basement.

Handcuffed to a dead woman.

Mulder stood and paced. He listened to his feet shuffle against the floor.

*

Her sister phoned at one thirty. Dinner on Saturday? "We could drive down to Richmond," Melissa said. "Get some free French gourmet from Charles." Her sister phoned every day now to talk, to schedule outings together.

Her mother simply left messages on her answering machine: "It's me, Dana. Just checking in." Her tone less declaration and more question. But it was the weak kind, as if she didn't really expect an answer. They had both wanted to stay a few days with her after the hospital, but Scully had insisted she would be fine.

She had believed she would be fine, at least, until the first nightmare.

She sat in her office chair with the lines of the expense report blurring on the white page. Sometimes that happened now, but all she had to do was blink, and the tears went away. "Sure, Saturday," she said. "But I might have a case before then."

"Well, how long does that usually take?" Missy asked. Her voice was loud on the receiver; she always crowded the phone.

"I don't know. It depends."

"Let me know if you can't then." Missy full of worry. Missy telling her everyday to talk to someone: Mulder, a counselor, anyone. Open up. Don't keep it inside.

"Okay," Scully answered. "Go ahead and call Charles."

"Okay. Love you." Her sister's voice warm and velvet on the edges.

"Me, too." Scully set the phone in its cradle and leaned back in her chair. She raised a hand to her throat, running a finger along the chain of her cross. Blinked, and waited until the lines on the expense report became clear again.

*

It wasn't just buildings and signs that were new. It was her body, as well. She had been putting on weight before Duane Barry. The thought had been nagging at her that she really ought to get back into shape. But then she opened her eyes in the hospital and it seemed she had become transparent, that her body had lost all presence.

Her mother and sister had brought her home from the hospital, and after she had finally made them believe she would be all right by herself, she went into her bedroom. She stood in front of her full-length mirror and took off all her clothes.

There hadn't been a large-size mirror in her hospital room, and until now she'd had to navigate the new geography of her body using only her hands.

She studied herself, noting the ribs and hipbones that now made hard ridges under her skin. Her breasts sagged beneath stark collarbones. The skin of her abdomen was looser somehow. She let her fingers drift between her legs, circling her labia. She could not tell if she had been touched there while she was gone.

Her eyes looked sunken, purple around the lids. She moved closer to the mirror, close enough so that she was almost kissing her reflection, breath fogging the glass. She examined the whites of her eyes and the skin of her face for broken blood vessels, but found nothing. She drew back, running a hand through shaggy hair.

Her mouth moved, but she did not speak.

*

"Minneapolis," Mulder said.

Scully raised her eyebrow. He noticed that her freckles were fading. It was almost winter, after all. "What's there?"

"Grave desecrations." His eyes were shuttered, hidden from the basement light.

Scully wanted to ask, "That's an X-File?" but just then the phone rang, and Mulder leaned across his desk to answer it. So she stayed silent, thinking of the grave they had opened in Bellefleur.

Mulder hung up the phone. "That was Skinner. Our 302's approved, so we can leave first thing tomorrow." He paused, watching her. "You're sure you want to go? Because...." he trailed off.

She stood and pinned him with a look. And it pinched his heart that it was only half of what it would have been four months ago. Her mouth was pale and tight. "Because what?"

Something uncoiled inside him and he leaned forward in his chair, words falling with careful timing. "We just came back from a case."

"That's never stopped us before."

"The circumstances are different now."

Scully shook her head. "Only as different as we let them be." She willed him to drop his gaze first, bearing down on him with her eyes.

His face was angled up toward hers, a quiet begging in all the lines made clear by the overhead light. "Scully," he said, and his voice had become small and childlike.

She felt something swelling in her chest, a trembling moving up into her throat. But she shook her head again and spoke around it. "What time should I meet you at the airport?"

He rose from his chair, his height looming all of a sudden, and she took an involuntary step back. The feeling in her throat pressed itself down into her lungs, and she drew in a breath.

A shadow of emotion crossed his face. Finally, he looked down. "I'll pick you up," he murmured.

"Okay," she said. "I should go home and pack. You can brief me about the case on the way there."

He nodded. "Sure, Scully. Get some rest."

Then she dropped her own eyes, and said to his shoes, "I'll see you tomorrow, Mulder." And she was out the door, for the second time that day.

*

Left alone in the office again, Mulder sighed and went to the filing cabinet. Under 'S' he found the red-stripe bordered folder, 'Dana Scully' printed on the cover.

He stood there in the dim light, fingering the borders of the file. The corners were becoming dog-eared already. He did not open it.

Scully needed time, whether she wanted it or not. This case was not an X-File, he knew that already, was thankful for a respite. Grave desecrations were disturbing, but fetishists were small potatoes compared to what they'd done in the Cascades. They could be in and out of it within a day.

At least she would have surfaced from this basement. She would be in a whole other city. He could take advantage of that, give her a brief moment without the underwater smell of the paranormal or the murderous. They could stay the night and do something...normal.

Minneapolis. Mulder had a flash of her under stadium lights and cheering noise. The both of them close together in a sea of people, sharing sodas and hot dogs. Perhaps even smiling, damn it.

The phone was in his hand, her file lying unopened on top of others in the cabinet drawer, and he found himself dialing Danny's number. He drummed his fingers on his desk until the information technician answered.

"It's Mulder," he said. "Got any Redskins tickets?"

And he tried to believe it could work.

*

Once home she listened to her messages and filled an overnight bag with clothes. Later she picked at dinner. Salad that tasted like it had been soaked in water all day.

She decided she needed a shower, and scraped the leafy remains down the garbage disposal.

Afterwards, condensation slicked her skin and blanketed the bathroom mirror with gray. She covered her body with a hurried towel and left before the glass could clear.

She had taken down the full-length mirror in her bedroom. But there was still a smaller one over her dresser, and as she stood in front of it opening drawers she couldn't help but catch sight of her face.

How pale she was. It caught at her, just like it had every day since she'd been back. It was a new thing, her face. And she could not write down what it was like before.


End file.
